Playgirl

I was very happy to write the intro essay for the newly-relaunched version of Playgirl magazine. Link to the essay coming soon, but in the meantime you can snag a copy here. Essay is below.

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The first time I remember seeing an issue of Playgirl was sometime in the awkward middle of Junior High. A friend’s older sister had a copy in her room—a well-leafed issue from 1985 featuring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis on the cover—which was dramatically revealed to us at a sleepover, though we were forbidden from actually looking at it. Throughout my teens, I’d occasionally see Playgirl pop up in the back shelves of gas stations or head shops, but as a closeted gay boy in rural Oklahoma, I had learned well by that point to feign indifference to anything that might incriminate me as a burgeoning homosexual. Still, the magazine remained lodged in my imagination. I didn’t have a chance to actually look at a copy until one of my girlfriends was gifted an issue as a gag gift when we were in high school. A few weeks later—seeing the magazine lingering in the detritus of the backseat of her Chevy Impala—I discreetly flipped through it while I thought no one was paying attention, mentally cataloging the size and shape of the male genitalia on display and bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t more of it. “Can you believe that magazine?” I remember my friend saying, catching me in the rearview. “Some of the guys are hot, but there are so many articles! Who is reading it?” 

Who is reading this? Who is this for? 

These are questions that come up a lot when considering the storied history of Playgirl. Beginning with the magazine’s debut issue in 1973, the publication’s mission was literally writ large: “For Women’s Enjoyment” (this would quickly morph into “The Magazine for Women” over the course of the next few issues, eventually landing on “Entertainment for Women” by the ’80s). According to original editor Carol Herring St. Francis in her first-ever editor’s letter, Playgirl magazine, “believes that a woman is a beautiful (inner beauty), intelligent, sensual person. Our concept of a Playgirl is not one who plays with life, but rather one who enjoys life to the fullest. She is a complete person and does not need liberation. A woman who is fulfilled is already liberated...as editor of Playgirl, I hope that this magazine can help you become aware of yourself as a woman and a person, to stimulate your brain and senses, and to find fulfillment as a playgirl who enjoys life to the fullest.” Positioned as a kind of feminist contemporary to Playboy, the “post-liberation” Playgirl emerged as a well-considered safe space for exploring sex and desire, but the magazine itself was a much more holistic, generous view of what a woman’s life was all about. While every issue featured male nudity in a variety of forms, hirsute male bodies actually occupy very little real estate in the issues that make up the first decade of the magazine’s history. Instead, there is wildly eclectic editorial content, which both reflects the burgeoning evolution of the women’s movement while often viewing it with a surprisingly critical eye. (For example, the premiere issue features both a critique of Ms. magazine and an essay outlining the psychological fallacies of the women’s liberation movement—written by a man) The magazine format provided a forum in which rapidly evolving social mores, cultural liberation, frank sexuality, and female desire could all freely exist together, even if the subjects themselves might often be fascinatingly at odds. When viewed through the chaotic quarantine prism of our current cultural moment, the notion that women had already achieved personal and political liberation in 1973 seems not only naive but deeply depressing. In 2020, at a time in which literally nothing can be viewed or discussed outside the necessary lens of politics, Playgirl’s early years—in which one’s political preferences were given approximately the same weight as truly understanding your own zodiac sign or changing your hair color—is mind-bogglingly quaint. 

As the magazine began to hit its stride in the mid-’70s, Playgirl presented an appropriately groovy idea of what a woman’s life could look like. The magazine offered advice on all-manner of sex (how to better have it, how to find it, what it meant to enjoy it—both as a married woman or as an empowered single lady), and there were also pieces on pregnancy, birth control, nutrition, fashion, plus a long-running, fern-packed feature on interior design (“Designs in Living”) that could serve as a permanent mood-board for Millenial apartment living circa right now. Not only did the magazine provide interviews galore with all-manner of TV and movie stars—Lynda Evans! John Travolta! Geraldo Rivera? —or famous homosexuals like Gore Vidal and Rock Hudson (markedly NOT talking about sex or sexuality, certainly not their own)—it also offered fiction and poetry from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood. 

Playgirl, particularly in its first decade, mirrored famous men’s magazines in the sense that it attempted to appeal to both highbrow and lowbrow interests, balancing articles on rape, sexism, and gender inequity with pictorials of women being seduced by spacemen or lotharios styled in the ribald style of romance novel covers. Still, tiptoeing back through the Playgirl archives is an exercise in seeing how radically cultural concerns were shifting. The 70’s issues lean heavily into astrological concerns and the evolution of the workplace (“Asking for What You’re Worth: How to Bargain for the Salary you Deserve”) and problems endemic to the disco era (an article from 1978 on the pitfalls of casual cocaine use features an illustration of an airplane showering New York City in white powder), while by the late ‘80s it was impossible to deny the specter of death haunting any and all discussions of sexuality, as evidenced by a 1988 article called “AIDS: Believe it or not” which examined the lingering myths around the illness and, more importantly, whether or not it was something heterosexual women should actually fear. (That this was still even a question by the late ’80s is astounding) For a magazine that, at least visually, presented a kind of respite from the real world, the intrusion of politics was often jarring, if not frequently tone-deaf. 

While the editorial content of Playgirl would be groundbreaking enough on its own, arguably the magazine’s biggest novelty still remains the fact that it celebrated male nudity in a culture programmed to think that only women should ever be viewed naked. Though photographs of nude men occupied only a fraction of the magazine, they gradually took up more real estate in Playgirl’s pages as the magazine went on. Naked men were everywhere doing all sorts of things—waterskiing, playing frisbee, frolicking seductively on the bows of sailboats, washing cars (as a fully-clothed woman looked on, admiringly), skydiving(!), delivering packages (literally and metaphorically), bagging groceries, working on construction sites, or often lounging in the vicinity of a motorcycle. You name it; a man was doing it while naked. Meanwhile, early issues also helped you imagine what famous men might look like naked thanks to photorealistic illustrations depicting the likes of Mick Jagger covering his cock with a towel or Richard Burton shielding his privates with a giant diamond. Elsewhere, famous men of the era (Fabian!) occasionally dropped by to drop their clothes, which was literally unheard of in a time before the internet. 

As Playgirl moved into the ’80s, the bodies on view got harder, shinier, more exclusively hairless. The penises on display, while still primarily and aggressively white, became slightly more tumescent and culturally diverse. The sex presented was no longer soft-focus, vaseline-lensed, and dreamlike, but—like everything else in that decade—somehow harder, more dangerous, increasingly joyless, and frenetic. The magazine still featured articles geared towards the interests and concerns of the 80’s woman, but more pages were devoted to themed pictorials and erotic fantasy prose that bore a closer resemblance to Penthouse’s famed “Forum” column than the gentle, sensual texts that graced the pages a decade earlier (a lascivious spread from 1973 offered the titillating text: “Your skin is taste and texture—warm peaches, ice, cut crystal, warm and cold, sweet and sour.”) By the late ’80s, Playgirl was offering softball interviews with soap opera actors, multi-page pictorials with big-haired male strippers (many of whom were famously gay), and graphic written depictions of sex. The times had definitely changed. 

As it was for many things birthed in the 1970s, the subsequent decades were not always kind to Playgirl. The magazine changed hands multiple times, lost and gained publishers, went in and out of style, and—for a time in the late aughts—existed only as a website. By the time Playgirl was resurrected in 2010 as a print publication (with Sarah Palin’s bad-boy son in law, Levi Johnson, as the cover star) the entity known as Playgirl had morphed from something with a radical feminist, pro-woman editorial voice into what was essentially gay porn. For anyone with a remembered fondness for Playgirl’s early years, it was ironic that something conceived as something specifically for women had been adopted, co-opted, and ultimately taken over by men, even if those men happened to be gay. While it is easy to joke that Playgirl had always been, on some level, mostly for gay men (it was rumored that the magazine’s readership had always been at least 30% gay and male), it’s ultimately not true at all. Though plenty of gay men such as myself had formative gay experiences looking at its pages, at its core, Playgirl was always a platform for women’s voices and desires. It existed radically within a culture that steadfastly maintained that, at worst, such desires did not exist or, at best, they didn’t actually matter. 

 It’s nearly impossible to emphasize or understand how different the landscape of sex and sexuality is now than it was in 1973 while also identifying the ways in which it sadly hasn’t changed that much at all, particularly in regards to how we think and talk about female sexuality. Still, it’s hard to imagine how things like Rookie or Jezebel or even Teen Vogue might exist in their current states without a precursor like Playgirl leading the way. While our understanding of gender, sexuality, sex work, consent, and sexual freedom might now be light years ahead of what they were nearly four decades ago, the notion of entertainment specifically for women—the continued exploration of what women might want to look at, read, or think about in order to be turned on and intellectually invigorated—is thankfully no longer such woefully unexplored territory. If the culture wars, racial division, toxic capitalism, and non-stop anxiety of the pandemic era have begun to teach us anything, it might just be that real progress only begins to happen when we start to pay attention to marginalized voices. In the case of Playgirl, an evolution of understanding has shown us that making a magazine for women shouldn’t be about pandering to them but actually listening to them instead.  

-T. Cole Rachel